


Shortcuts

by jaegermighty



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Astronomy, Character Study, Gen, Physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-07 09:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4258560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegermighty/pseuds/jaegermighty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shortcuts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raktajinos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raktajinos/gifts).



Every Saturday morning, Jupiter stops at a coffee shop a few blocks away from the library and orders a tall white mocha with one shot of raspberry and extra whip. It costs four dollars and fifty-five cents, which she pays for using the credit card that Stinger has given her: a sleek, black AmEx with her full name printed on the back in matte. Jupiter has never seen a single bill or statement for this credit card, and she has no idea who pays for it or how, only that somebody, somewhere, does, and every once in while Kiza will look at her out of the side of her eye and say, "I wonder if Her Majesty has forgotten that her credit card has no limit," and Jupiter will find herself in the unique position of feeling guilty for _not_ being extravagant with her money. 

She doesn't want to be extravagant, is the thing, what she wants is: a tall white mocha with one shot of raspberry and extra whip, every Saturday morning, to drink as she walks down Michigan Avenue window shopping. Sometimes she goes inside the shops, but mostly she doesn't, because silk and perfume and money have a certain _smell,_ a kind of presence that reminds her of things she'd rather not be reminded of, so mostly she just looks. Sometimes Caine walks with her, sometimes he doesn't. He wears his hair long, these days, with a knit hat and a pointy beard that makes him look like a mountain man version of Santa Claus. Jupiter trims his mustache for him. 

"Do you like this dress?" he'll ask, following her line of sight, "do these shoes please you?" and she'll shake her head no, say _really, I don't want to actually buy anything_ , and pull him down the sidewalk by his hand. She hopes he understands, worries that he doesn't, but for her birthday, he gives her a two-year subscription to six different fashion magazines, and she laughs in delight and relief. It's one of the best presents she's ever received, she tells him, and means it. She just likes to look. 

 

 

When her father was young, her mother told her, his father, Jupiter's grandfather, was taken to an asylum in Moscow, and before that, he'd been a journalist. _More brains than sense,_ said Jupiter's mother, whose sadness always comes with a healthy side-order of impatience. _Vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya, they said it was, but God only knows, Jupiter, God only knows._ Being thirteen at the time, Jupiter had taken this as clear evidence that her family was not only the worst thing ever but also the craziest thing ever, and had entertained thoughts of becoming a psychiatrist for about a month and a half. This daydream had been promptly abandoned upon learning how many years of college it takes to become a psychiatrist, but sometimes in the back of her head, Jupiter wonders: _if things had been different, could I have hacked it?_ (Probably.)

Her parents were both professors in Russia. Her mother studied economics, her father studied space, and Aleksa used to say: _I was focused on how the world worked, and he focused on everything else._ Jupiter has a scrapbook of all their official academic work that her dad had diligently collected - their articles, the textbook her mother co-authored, the star charts her father drew himself. In the back, there's an article her grandfather wrote, from 1972. Her mother had said that her grandmother had had to hide it, and not tell anyone that she'd clipped it out and saved it. That tiny, laminated article had been one of her dad's most prized possessions. 

Captain Diomika Tsing has a brand - well, not a brand, a _marking,_ which is what Caine calls the burned, patterned scar on his neck that makes him flinch away like he's been hit every time she accidentally touches it - on her left bicep that she explains to Jupiter is her _aegis maut'na,_ or the name of the man who had trained her for her commission. One night, on a trip to Orous for yet another round of the war on paperwork, Jupiter had introduced the good Captain to vodka screwdrivers, and she'd told Jupiter about him in sparse, yet intense, detail. 

"His name was ProCommander Iasos Auskena," Tsing said, "he had very bright green eyes, and a horrible temper. But he was very smart, and very honorable. He taught me everything I know."

"He must've been something," Jupiter replied. "Because you sure know a lot."

Tsing inclined her head once in exchange for the compliment, sipping at her screwdriver with serene concentration. Tsing does everything with a lot of serenity, including battle, which Jupiter has been fortunate - or unfortunate - enough to witness only a few times. Caine says that Jupiter is the same way, which is strange. Jupiter's not even sure she even knows what serenity feels like. "He was highly revered and respected. Many of us thought that he would lead the fleet one day."

"'Was'?"

"He resigned from the Aegis after an incident with the third daughter of the House of Yeyana," Tsing said. Her expression didn't falter. "He was accused of impropriety and was sentenced to exile from Aegis jurisdiction space."

"Oh." Jupiter didn't know what to say. "That must have been...difficult for you."

"I regret that a once great man chose to disgrace his commission in such a manner," Tsing said woodenly, and pounded back the rest of her vodka in one aggressive swig. Jupiter bit her lip and thought about her dad's scrapbook.

Truth is dangerous, knowledge is power, and choice is a luxury: these are things that Jupiter knows. They're things she _has_ now. There's no reason to it, no logic. She is who she is, and because of who she is, she has power, and freedom, and agency. Every being on every planet in this universe is the same: you are born into a particular spot on the star chart, and you make your way home from there. No shortcuts, unless it's written into the map for you, of course. Sometimes you get help, mostly you don't. Good luck, and don't smudge the lines. 

Tsing's _maut'na_ probably didn't knock anybody up, just like Jupiter's grandfather probably wasn't really schizophrenic. Jupiter would like to ask her, just to get confirmation, but she doesn't really need to. These kinds of things are better not talked about, anyway. 

 

 

Caine has a lot of nightmares, which Jupiter doesn't really know how to deal with. Aleksa had nightmares, about Maximilian's death, when Jupiter was little, and she'd dealt with those by climbing into her mother's bed and curling up at her feet, hugging her legs, like a cat. Her mother hadn't appreciated it very much, and sometimes Vladie still calls her _koshechka,_ but only when they're in public somewhere and he knows she can't smack him for it. 

Caine's are different though - for one, it's a very, very different thing to climb into bed with Caine than it was to do the same with her mother, and for another: Caine is a very, very different thing, period. She's known this from the moment they met, and it only had a little bit to do with the space assassins who'd been chasing them at the time.

He sleeps lightly most nights but sometimes, when they're somewhere safe (which is, in Caine's opinion, a category exclusively limited to Tsing's ship, and nowhere else) he'll fall into a deeper slumber, which is when the dreams come. She can feel them coming by how he starts to twitch, and then shake, his body trembling against hers in bed. Then come the sounds - the most awful part, and it breaks Jupiter's heart to listen to them, but she can't plug her ears either, because that'd be worse. It'd be like pretending it's not happening, that it doesn't exist. _Not my pain, not my problem._ That's not the kind of queen Jupiter wants to be. 

She'd tried waking him at first, but he'd seemed rather mortified about it, and wouldn't stop apologizing, so she doesn't do that anymore. She's come to hate his apologies, which come frequently and for things that Jupiter never expects - things, she's been slowly reasoning out, that he thinks are grave missteps in his own nature: his habits, his senses, his instincts. Mistakes in his flawed genetic code that somebody, somewhere, must have told him were his own fault. Maybe it's what he dreams about, maybe it isn't, but whatever it is must be horrible, and Jupiter's trying to do this whole relationship thing the best and most right way she can, so she holds him, and listens to him, and hopes that it helps. 

They'd went out to dinner once, not long after Jupiter had introduced him to her family ("Yes, Caine, like a dog, no Uncle, you cannot call him Fido,") and she'd been so nervous and weird that she made herself nauseous, and barely touched her food. She couldn't stop asking him these worried questions: _is the food okay? We can go somewhere else? Do the people - the crowd bother you? Just let me know and we can leave._ For every one she'd asked, he'd had one to counter, until the night had devolved into a merry-go-round of neuroticism and anxiety, which is kind of hilarious in retrospect, even if neither of them had particularly enjoyed it at the time. Sometimes she's shocked they managed to get anywhere at all, what with how hard they were both trying to be respectful. 

He flinches sometimes when she touches the wrong spot; she doesn't ever want to talk about Titus, and yells at him when he brings it up. But they go flying together after a fight, and the air melts the anger away. Maybe someday she'll try waking him up again during a nightmare. Or maybe, she hopes, he'll stop having them before she gets the courage to try. 

 

 

Plan "please don't fuck over my planet after I'm dead" (otherwise known as Plan A) goes like this: under Bylaw 78-9 of the Hat-airi Shbreznev Treaty, Subsection D8, Jupiter can endow Earth as a "relict of cultural importance particularly significant to the legacy of richness of the Shbreznev Empire," which is a weirdo-space way of saying that she can turn her entire planet into a historical heritage site because this dead emperor guy once wrote in his journal that he really liked dinosaurs.

"Ah, Uncle Hayden," says Kalique. They don't brunch together or anything, but the cadre of lawyers procured for her by Stinger inform her that keeping these monthly holocalls is strategically important for such and such something or other, so Jupiter endures it. "Oh, he wasn't _really_ our uncle, of course - just a good friend of the family - but he insisted we call him that, anyway. Such a friendly man. He had a pet triceratops he used to let me play with."

"...right," Jupiter says. "So you think it'll work?"

"Well, of course it will work!" Kalique's image wavers slightly, the holographic edges of her smile disassembling and reassembling as the subspace connection stutters and smoothes, the space-age version of static. "You are Seraphi Abrasax. If you say it will be, then of course it will be."

"Right," Jupiter says again, for lack of anything more impressive. Behind the holocall display, standing at attention in the doorway where Kalique can't see, Caine raises a single, ironic eyebrow, and Jupiter reminds herself not to smile. "Well...I am hopeful that it can be arranged, for everyone's benefit."

"Certainly," Kalique murmurs, her face wavering in and out again. Her expression is always calm, and blankly pleasant; Jupiter doesn't think she's ever seen her show any kind of emotion stronger than mild surprise. It's unnerving, absolutely, but she lacks the kind of...sick polish that Titus had worn, not to mention the cold absence of Balem's gaze, so as immortal, reincarnated triplets go she's pretty much the cream of the crop. "If you require any assistance, I do hope that you would come to me…?"

"I'll keep you in mind," Jupiter says neutrally. 

Kalique nods, a smooth bow of her throat and head. "I hope you will," she says simply, and there's something almost wistful in her expression as they say their goodbyes, or maybe Jupiter's just feeling weird about the whole thing again. At least she's not addressing Jupiter as "Mother" anymore.

Jupiter unfolds herself from the couch slowly; she's got pins and needles in her feet. Caine offers her his hand and she takes it, leaning on his arm and shifting her weight from side to side as her legs slowly come back to life. 

"You did well," he says, and Jupiter smiles up at his shoulder. In the kitchen, Stinger is cooking something that smells kind of repulsive, but she knows it will taste like heaven; everything he makes always does. Kiza is in the garden, weeding the tomato plants. Jupiter's cell phone buzzes softly against her hip - her mother, probably. More questions Jupiter can't answer. 

"She freaks me out," Jupiter says honestly. Caine huffs out a little laugh, sliding his free hand down the back of her shoulder blade. "I don't trust her."

"You have good instincts." He sounds amused, and a little condescending. 

"Did Seraphi trust her?"

"I don't know." Caine is the only one who seems to view Jupiter and Seraphi as separate entities; everyone else she meets seems to think they are interchangeable. On bad days, Jupiter thinks about that car accident she was in when she was sixteen, and wishes that the light pole she'd hit had left some scars. At least then she wouldn't have to look at her own fucking face all the time, etched in marble, painted in effigy. There's a planet in the h'Yuvin system that even has Seraphi's image on their damn money. "Seraphi's love for her children was legendary. They called her the Mother Wolf, on some planets."

Jupiter wrinkles her nose. "Weird."

Caine chuckles again, leaning down and snuffling a little against her hair - smelling her, and marking her with his own scent. It is the way of Jupiter's life now that it's the least bizarre thing about this conversation. "Indeed. She was nothing like a wolf."

Jupiter grins, leaning heavily into his chest and linking her hands around his waist. "Trust and love are two different things, you know."

"Her Majesty is very wise," Caine rumbles softly, still rubbing his fuzzy cheek against the top of her head. Jupiter can feel his beard catching her hair, rumpling it out of its loose bun. "Which is why it puzzles me that She continues to forget to shut down the holocall after She is finished."

"You sound like Kiza," Jupiter teases, giggling a little when he jerks his head away from her in a mimicry of outrage. "Such nags, both of you."

"It is all for Her Majesty's own good," Caine says, pulling her gently towards the kitchen, and laughs again when she reaches out and punches him in the arm. Jupiter pouts; he probably didn't even feel it.

 

 

When Jupiter thinks of space now, she thinks of Balem. A black, endless sky, lit only by pinpricks of faraway stars. Emptiness on top of emptiness, an expanse of nothing, floating corpses, dead worlds full of empty houses, coffins flying silently around the universe. 

Everything spins in space. Planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies. The Milky Way is one among billions, and it spins too, at one hundred million kilometers per hour. Every scrap of matter in the observable universe is hurtling away from itself at ninety percent the speed of light - that's part of the Big Bang theory, why scientists think it all started with an explosion. Inflation. Inertia. The first law of Newton: an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion, unless something bigger and stronger comes along and makes it stop. Jupiter thinks about black holes and the theory of relativity and the smooth, hairless plane of Balem's chest, heaving in agony as he lay dying at her feet. 

These people - these _aliens,_ they think seeing is believing, and understanding, and knowing. They gave Jupiter a fortune because of what - how she looks? The arrangement of the atoms that make up her face? The random sequence of genomes in her cells, the one in a million happenstance of her DNA - it's all such silly, ridiculous bullshit. Life is an accident, and so is evolution. The universe is just another bubble of spacetime, curved by gravity into an endless sphere. The end is the beginning, the beginning is the end, time and space and space and time - it's all the same. A day on Jupiter is only ten hours on Earth, and Seraphi Abrasax was a very frightening, evil person, by most accounts. What the hell does it even matter?

Jupiter's legacy used to be simple: her father studied the stars, her mother studied money. They came to America for a better life, to work hard and to build something new, away from tragedy. Her scrapbook and her telescope and her family - that was it. Space was mystery and excitement and musty quantum physics textbooks with notes scribbled in Russian in the margins, VCR tapes of old Carl Sagan documentaries, trips to the planetarium on weekends. Space was _fun._

Balem died in space. Titus lives out there still, floating around in his stupid, pretty ship, throwing parties and laughing at her with his friends. Tsing lives in space, Kiza was born there, too. Caine and Stinger were created there. Humanity was born on Orous, not Earth. Entire worlds, societies, cultures of millions of unique, individual beings, humans and otherwise, that explode into existence and then spin through the universe, objects in motion that stay in motion with the same speed and direction until they are acted upon by an unbalanced force.

It's horrifying and terrible and Jupiter's having a rough time with it. She's been an object her whole life, becoming the unbalanced force is taking some adjustment. But, well - Stinger says that she has always been royalty, she just didn't _know_ it until now, and maybe that's what makes the difference. The Earth rotates at a speed of sixteen hundred kilometers per hour, but sitting in Stinger's kitchen eating dinner, Jupiter can't feel herself moving at all. 

 

 

The fastest objects in the universe are neutron stars, which spin up to seven hundred and sixteen times a second, which is approximately forty-three thousand rotations per minute. They are the densest and smallest stars in existence, with a radius of only twelve kilometers, but they have twice as much mass as the sun. They are the result of the collapse of a supernova and are composed almost entirely of neutrons (subatomic particles that lack net electrical charge), which is why they're as small as small can possibly get, because neutrons are fermionic particles and according to the Pauli exclusion principle no two fermionic particles can occupy the same place and quantum state simultaneously. It's one of the highlights of the "weird shit gravity does" montage reel of astrophysics; when you add more mass and density, it becomes a black hole. They can't even prove the math. 

...on Earth, anyway. There's a Scientific Academy on Orous that Stinger tells her about once, offhand and casual like he thinks she won't care. Stinger never says anything casually, however, which is how she knows he's been planning the conversation out in his head for a while. 

"Are there many queens who go to this Scientific Academy?" Jupiter asks dryly. 

Stinger shrugs, still forcibly casual. His shoulders are slumped, but also very tense - it makes Jupiter feel kind of funny, and also very tender. "Only the Entitled are permitted to attend," he says. "Your Majesty would not stand out much."

"I don't stand out on Earth at all," Jupiter points out. 

"True," Stinger allows. "But on Earth, you'd have to get a GED."

Jupiter is startled into laughter. "Okay, you've got a point there."

Stinger ducks his head, bending back over the scattered bits of whatever it is that he's tinkering with. She can't tell if he's embarrassed or pleased or what, his face is so blank. Caine says it's just Stinger's _way_ \- usually while wearing that same exact stoic, placid expression, so Jupiter figures it for another fucked up thing they do in that fucked up military splice program of theirs. "Just an idea. I know Your Majesty is interested in astroscience, and the field is much more advanced on Orous than it is here. You would have much more to learn, and more opportunities to apply it."

"Isn't that sort of like...cheating?" Jupiter asks. "Like skipping to the end of a book before you read it?"

Stinger's face loses its blankness and rearranges into bemusement. "Your Majesty," he says slowly, "life is not a game of chance, not Monopoly."

Jupiter laughs again, surprising herself twice in one conversation. "So you think I should pass Go, take the two hundred dollars and shut up about it, is what you're saying."

"Something like that." Stinger graces her with a rare smile, the same kind he will sometimes bestow upon Caine and Kiza, when neither of them are looking. "It's a big universe; there's much we still don't know. Skipping a few steps doesn't matter much when the end is still thousands of light years beyond our reach."

"I guess." Jupiter bites her lip. "College in space, huh. If my dad only knew."

"Perhaps he did," Stinger says absently, his face falling back into its neutral default. "Some Earth people figure it out. They can never prove it though, not without help."

"What, like UFO conspiracy stuff?" Jupiter asks. A sudden idea strikes, and she feels her jaw drop open. "Oh my God - all those people who say they were abducted by aliens, were they telling the _truth?_ "

Something in the arch of Stinger's eyebrow tells Jupiter that he's laughing at her, although he'd never dare to do it out loud. "It happens occasionally. It's illegal, though, a level four crime under Aegis jurisdiction."

" _I_ was abducted by aliens," Jupiter says, just realizing this. "My entire family was. Holy shit."

Stinger arches his eyebrows again, definitely laughing at her. "Would you like a glass of water or something?"

"No," Jupiter says, scowling.

"Maybe some whiskey, then."

Jupiter thinks about it. "Yeah, okay. That would help."

 

 

Her endowment for Earth is accepted, and Jupiter spends three weeks on Orous filling out the paperwork. She tells her family that Caine won a cruise on a really big yacht with no cell phone reception. 

"They think I'm in _Barbados,_ " Jupiter complains, under her breath as they wait for the fourth round of notaries to finish rereading the contracts. Caine flicks his eyes down briefly and his nose twitches, the only sign that he's even heard her. "They think I'm sitting on the deck of a big fancy ship in a bikini, drinking margaritas and necking with my hot lumberjack boyfriend."

"I do not know what a lumberjack is," Caine mutters. 

Jupiter sighs, staring morosely at the side of his face, freshly shaven as a courtesy to the sensibilities of her lawyers. She really, really misses the beard. "I'll tell you later," she says glumly. 

By the time it's all squared away and Earth is safely classified as a cultural, no-harvesting-allowed treasure, Jupiter doesn't want to even hold a pen ever again in her life, let alone be forced to sign her name for the gazillionth time. She collapses on Tsing's ship and sleeps for almost twenty hours, and when she wakes up they're already gone, hurtling through space, Orous a distant light in their wake. 

Phylo brings her food, the dish they all eat on the ship, which is this fragrant meat stew with the consistency of grape jelly. He sips on lemon tea, sitting and chatting with her while she eats, and brings her to the observation bridge when she's done. 

"Your Caine has a surprise for you, I understand," he says, guiding her with a careful hand next to her arm - hovering just above her skin, without making actual contact. The Aegis officers never touch her; it's against regulations, apparently. "He seemed quite flustered about it, I do hope it's nothing scandalous."

"Caine? Scandalous?" Jupiter shakes her head with a smile. "Maybe in some other universe, but not this one."

"Strange things happen out here in the black, you never know," Phylo replies, with a sly little smile. "At any rate I did disable the security feeds for the night, just to be safe, so do try not to fall into grave danger or anything…?"

"I'll do my best," Jupiter promises. Phylo nods gravely. 

Caine stands by the window-that-is-not-a-window, his arms folded behind his back and his feet squared, like he's at parade rest. He looks up and nods at Phylo when they enter, and Jupiter sighs, wandering into the room while they make their manly eye contact. The "thanks for taking care of the queen" thing is pretty old, but an inevitability she can't change. 

"I'll leave you now," Phylo says, exchanging one last silent look with Caine before melting back into the darkness of the corridor. Jupiter turns to look at Caine, one eyebrow raised, once he's gone. 

He looks back at her blandly. "What?"

"Nothing," Jupiter replies, and rolls her eyes. 

Caine huffs a little, turning back to the not-window. "Did you sleep well, Majesty?"

"You never use my name when we're on this ship," Jupiter says. Caine tilts his head at her curiously. "Just an observation. Yes - I slept fine."

"It's harder to break the conventions when we're surrounded by them," Caine replies, hesitating and visibly steeling himself, "Jupiter."

Jupiter smiles, feeling a fierce stab of affection lancing through her heart. "It wasn't a criticism." Caine tilts his head again, his expression full of skepticism. Jupiter shrugs, still smiling, and takes the hand he offers. "So Phylo said you had a surprise."

"Any moment now," Caine says, swinging her around to stand by his side. He has such grace to his movements - maybe she should take him dancing sometime. "The Captain and I arranged it."

Jupiter leans lightly against him and silently waits, and sure enough, it's only a few moments before the camera feed refreshes and the not-window explodes with color. "Oh," Jupiter says, taking a physical step back in her surprise. "Oh."

"We pass it every time we travel to Orous," Caine says. "I was afraid you would sleep through it again."

"I'm not _always_ sleeping, sometimes I'm busy," Jupiter protests, but it's a weak one, her attention enraptured. "It's a nebula."

"The Cat's Eye," Caine says. "That's what you call it on Earth."

Jupiter nods absently, still distracted. The image isn't very impressive, captured in transit by the ship's outer cameras and then blown up and overexposed on the not-window, but - it's a smear of brightness that Jupiter has seen before dozens of times, in textbooks and documentaries, only...real. Right in front of her eyes, it's - the real thing. 

"Its designation in the Commonwealth planetary registry is OA8#b," Caine says. "But locals call it 'the sink.' They run cruise ships through the outer halo for tourists, but the inner zone is no fly. If you get too close to the stars at the center, the radiation starts to mess with your navigational systems and shielding technology stops functioning; they're still not sure why."

"The sink," Jupiter murmurs. "It does kind of look like one, doesn't it? Or a big whirlpool."

"A little," Caine agrees. 

"I suppose it's a good thing," Jupiter says. "They'd probably build a mine or something in it, if they could."

"Probably," Caine says, and Jupiter wonders just how much of Earth's astronomical observations are incorrect due to that kind of interference. "There's a political organization that's trying to endow all the #b class nebulas as protected phenomena, to stop the Houses from monetizing them. They're gaining some traction."

"Environmental activism in space," Jupiter says, shaking her head in amazement. "Okay. Sure."

"Humans are remarkably static," Caine says, sounding amused. Jupiter tears her eyes away from the not-window and peers up at him curiously. "No matter their situation, or the circumstances they've adapted to, they find a way to reenact the same patterns of behavior, over and over again."

"Are you saying we're...boring?" Jupiter says, caught halfway between amusement and outrage. 

"No," Caine replies. "I actually find it comforting."

Amusement wins, and Jupiter laughs, realizing a second too late that he might take offense - but all he does is smile indulgently, brushing a gentle hand down her back. "How many worlds have you been to, anyway?"

"Many," Caine says. "I don't remember them all."

"Have you ever been out of the Milky Way?" Jupiter asks. "I mean - the Commonwealth."

Caine shoots her a sidelong glance. "Yes," he says, haltingly. "The Legion has jurisdiction over foreign threats and affairs. Many of the campaigns I fought in took place outside of Commonwealth boundaries."

"How far did you go?" Jupiter presses. "Like - how much is...out there?"

"How much of what?" Caine asks, bemused. "How many humans?"

"Just…" Jupiter trails off, motioning vaguely at the nebula with one hand. "I don't know. How far does it all go, I guess."

Caine is quiet for a moment, brushing his hand up and down her back in a calming gesture. Whether he's trying to calm Jupiter or himself, she doesn't know, but - either way, it's working. "The Commonwealth," he starts, and then frowns and starts over. "There is another galaxy, the closest one to ours, that contains an organization of beings that call themselves the Venextris. They're conquerors, and we've defended our borders against them for millennia. Their military is supremely strong, and no Commonwealth citizen has ever crossed into their territory and returned alive, so it is unknown what life is like there, or if there is human life at all."

"The Andromeda Galaxy?" Jupiter asks. "We're supposed to collide with them, you know."

"I know," Caine says, long suffering and a little bit dry. "Not anytime soon, thankfully. Hopefully by then, the war will not be an issue."

"What about other galaxies? There's what, like fifty of them in our local group, and in the Virgo Supercluster there's...shit, I don't even remember. I don't even think we know for sure."

"Fifty-seven in the local group, if you count the dwarfs," Caine supplies. "As far as the...supercluster, you called it? I'm not sure. I don't think our scientists have observed very much outside of the Commonwealth's immediate neighbors."

"So you don't know? You've never been there, sent ships or satellites or probes or anything…"

Caine shrugs, smiling down at her fondly. "I was a Legion skyjacker, Your Majesty. I did not travel to any place where there was not a battle to fight. I am also not a scientist; I only know what most people know."

Jupiter blushes, and looks back at the nebula, a little flustered. "Right, of course. Sorry."

"There is nothing to apologize for." Caine leans down, pressing his chin against her temple affectionately, and Jupiter's pulse jumps. "You are never offended by my questions, how could I be offended by yours?"

"So," Jupiter says softly, "I'm not one of those boring _other_ humans then, huh?"

"No," Caine scoffs, like it's a stupid question. Jupiter supposes he's right about that. 

A silence falls, and they stand together in it, leaning into each other and looking out at the nebula. After a while, the cameras refresh again, and the nebula disappears like it was never there, leaving only a wide, blank plane of stars. 

"Thanks for this," Jupiter says, pressing her face against his chest. Her warm, strong companion, always at her back. She doesn't want to think about what this life would be like without him. 

"You're welcome, Jupiter," Caine says. He doesn't stutter over her name at all. 

 

 

Every time Jupiter returns to Earth, she buys her mother something. Most of the time, it's a cover for whatever excuse she'd given for her absence, like a novelty postcard or a cheap souvenir that someone procures for her, but this time, she buys a dress, in a shade of burgandy that will bring out Aleksa's eyes. 

"This is too much," she mutters, shaking her head in stern disapproval, at the same time as she runs her hands over the material, over and over, like she can't help herself. Jupiter sits quietly on the bed, smiling, waiting for her mother to finish. "Too expensive, Jupiter! You should have spent this money on yourself, or saved it for school."

"I can't go to school, Mama," Jupiter says. "You know that."

"Well not now, but someday you will," Aleksa says, still stern. The way she does everything. "You want to clean houses for the rest of your life? Of course not. Of course you will go to school."

Jupiter watches her hands clench in the skirt and thinks about saying: _Okay, fine. I'll go to school. I actually have a spot waiting for me at an elite science program, whenever I want it. Tuition won't be a problem. Neither will rent, anymore. There's an apartment in Lincoln Park that I've been looking at - do you want to come? I can buy you a house. I can buy you a mansion. I can buy you anything you want._

She doesn't. "Of course, Mama. Listen - it's dry clean only, okay? But it's cotton, so you can hand wash it if you're careful."

"I know how to wash dry clean only!" Aleksa snaps, but she's smiling. "Oh, it's too much. Why would you do this, Jupiter? Much too expensive, where would I even wear it?"

"You can wear it wherever you want," Jupiter says, reaching out and touching her mother's arm, encouraging. "Wear it to work, if you feel like it."

"That'll be the day," Aleksa grumbles, still smiling. "Did you buy something for Nino? She'll be jealous."

"I'll get her something next time." Jupiter grins as Aleksa stands, holding the dress up to her body in the mirror. "It'll look so nice on you."

Her mother scoffs. "This new boyfriend is spoiling you," she scolds, but gently, and Jupiter knows she's only teasing. "Cruises, vacations here and there - what's next? You become a high society woman?" Jupiter smiles to herself. 

"No. Never," she promises, meaning it with every bone in her body. "You know me."


End file.
